The Indian SuperComputer
: PARAM 10000

Indian computer scientists seem to have acquired just the right kind of
chip on
their shoulders with the development of the Param-10000 supercomputer which
was unveiled over the past weekend.

For this 100 Giga-Flops ('flops' indicating the number of floating point
operations
per second) supercomputer — capable of performing a 100 billion mathematical
operations by the time you count one—heralds India's entry into the exclusive
club of a handful of supercomputing nations. The achievement is all the
more
remarkable since it will effectively dampen the enthusiasm of some American
policy-makers to bring subcontinental supercomputing skills under heel
with a raft
of restrictions issued by the US State Department. Washington's regulations,
which came into effect last month, ostensibly sought to prevent the 'misuse'
of
US-built supercomputers in India, China, Russia, Pakistan, and Israel for
military
purposes. Indeed, the State Department has inadvertently admitted that
the new
rules — drawn up so diligently by the US Export Control Administration—will
have to face strong displeasure from these countries which may resent American
attempts to usher in a new form of "scientific colonialism".

Washington had earlier sought to cramp India's supercomputing style in
1991
when the Bush administration enforced a capacity ceiling of 900 million
theoretical
operations per second (MTOPS) on any US machine sold to India. New Delhi's
response, of course, was to spur the Centre for Development of Advanced
Computing (C-DAC) to come up with the powerful Param series of
supercomputers, weakening the American monopoly of the Indian market for
high-end systems. And now India can be proud of having achieved
self-sufficiency in supercomputing with the development of the
Param-10000—probably the most powerful machine of its kind in the developing
world, with applications in areas as diverse as engineering, industry,
business,
medicine, and astrophysics. Its 100 Giga-Flop open frame architecture ensures
a
scalable potential of an astounding level of computing power, a technological
capability currently possessed only by the US and Japan, and yet to be
developed in Europe.